This Wednesday, Meta announced that it is going to begin rolling out AMBER alerts (notifications of missing children in the area) to Instagram across 25 countries. Meta says it has helped authorities find hundreds of missing children since it introduced AMBER alerts to Facebook back in 2015.
AMBER alerts for Instagram was developed with various organizations including: the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the US, the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, the National Crime Agency in the US, the Attorney General’s Office in Mexico, and the Australian Federal Police to list a few.
“With this update, if an AMBER Alert is activated by law enforcement and you are in the designated search area, the alert will now appear in your Instagram feed,” it says on Instagram’s blog post. The alert will include the missing child’s photo, description, last location, and other available information. Instagram will use signals such as your IP address and location services (if enabled) and the city listed on your profile to decide whether you should receive an AMBER alert.
AMBER Alerts on Instagram begins its rollout today and will take place over the next couple of weeks across 25 countries including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Ecuador, Greece, Guatemala, Ireland, Jamaica, Korea, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Romania, South Africa, Taiwan, Ukraine, the UK, UAE, and the US.
